10 Oct 2016 Museum plans quilt display

The Faulkner County Museum is displaying Friendship quilts from the museum’s textile collection at the Faulkner County Library.

Since the museum will be closed for several more weeks to accommodate mold abatement and other repairs, the library is partnering with the museum to mount a series of rotating displays of museum artifacts, beginning with Friendship quilts.

Quilts tell stories of families, big events and communities. They reflect what was going on in politics, religion, art, history, economics, fashion, style and technology.  

The Faulkner County Museum’s textile collection contains quilts from three centuries. For this display, a sampling of those quilts was selected for both the stories they tell, and their own interesting histories. Each quilt comes from a small community in Faulkner County. Each quilt was made sometime during the 1930s or 1940s, and contains the names of women and men from these communities. Each quilt represents a family, an event or a cause, and is a treasure in its own right.

These quilts are from a style known as a “Friendship” quilt. These are often communally made, blocks of the same pattern are pieced by a number of individuals in the neighborhood, and their names are usually embroidered in the center of each block. These blocks would be set together, often by one or two people, and then quilted by a group over the course of a day or two. Common Friendship block patterns include the Churn Dash, Friendship Star, Square in a Square, and many variations of album blocks.

For more information, call the library at 501.327.7482 or email [email protected].